Professor Karim Lakhani and a task force of 36 faculty and staff from across HBS, charged with envisioning a new digital future for the School, have mapped a path for digital transformation. The direction they have set is based on interviews, data analysis, and design-thinking workshops that the task force completed over the course of five months earlier this year.

"We've built amazing infrastructure on our in-person campus. Now we need to do the same thing for our digital capacity," says Lakhani, the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration and the founder and codirector of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard University. "Our stakeholders expect HBS to be excellent when it comes to their digitally mediated interactions." In this conversation, Lakhani speaks about the lessons HBS can learn from Amazon and Netflix, the power of shared data, and what alumni can do to drive this vital change.

How does HBS define “digital transformation”?

Oftentimes, when people think about “transformation,” they think about complete change. But there is a mathematical definition of transformation that is about keeping the essence of something, but representing it in a very different way. That’s our model. When we think about digital transformation, we are thinking about all of the functions in the School—and we mean all the functions—and how they could be done in a data-driven way. This will enable us to personalize every experience, reach more people, and build communities across HBS.

Why is this important for the School?

If we’re going to be the world leaders in business education, we can’t afford not to have this as a core competency. We have to be really good at it because everything now is mediated through digital technologies and people’s expectations
have changed. Your shopping experience at Amazon, your music experience with Spotify, and your viewing experience with Netflix show you that much more is possible. “Why isn’t HBS enabling this for me as well?”

How did the task force develop its recommendations?

When Dean Srikant Datar asked me back in November 2020 to create a task force, I said I wanted to follow the same model we had used for the virtualization of teaching task force during the pandemic: a real faculty-staff collaboration.
I also wanted this task force to have a strict deadline and to be enterprise-wide. It had to be all-encompassing, because digital transformation is all-encompassing.

We were stakeholder-driven, collecting input from students, faculty, staff, and alumni. We took a design-thinking approach to the solution-generation process. We issued a report and kept the HBS community informed, doing monthly debriefs with leadership across the School and kicking off a “Lunch and Learn” series for staff.

What are the first steps the task force recommends?

The first big step is to build a common data platform and a common data perspective. A decade ago, that would have been a Herculean task, but technology has moved fast, and it’s no longer this “bet your company on it” thing as it’s cheaper and quicker to iterate. The next priority will be building a content management and delivery platform that is School-wide.

Then we can think about what additional things we can do on top of those platforms—apps that anybody can build to amplify their message across the broader HBS ecosystem. This kind of platform thinking enables our staff and faculty to do the most critical and creative work and leave the heavy lifting—the type of work that happens today in spreadsheets and emails—to the platform.

How is this digital transformation part of the School’s larger focus on digitalization?

Digital transformation is about what HBS does and how it does it. But we also need to teach more digital content to our students. That means more courses on statistics, data analytics, machine learning, and fairness and ethics in AI. Data science is the new accounting. Nobody comes to HBS to become an accountant, but we teach them accounting. Nobody’s going to come to HBS to become a data scientist, but you need to know data science to be able to talk the new language of business. We’re thinking about this for the MBA Program, for Executive Education, and as part of our lifelong learning offerings for our alumni. What programs can we create for alumni so that they can get up to speed on these topics?

In what way will this digital transformation affect alumni interactions with the School?

We should be able to give them a much more customized experience. For example, we might ask alumni: Given your life stage and the types of questions you have, who are the people you should be talking to among our alumni community? Are there ways for us to better understand your interests, both professional and personal, and match you with other people with whom you can connect and with the salient content you need? If I sent you one message saying, “Here are the people you should be talking to, here’s the content, here’s where you’re at in your career, given the information you’ve provided to us,” that becomes much more relevant for alumni. Everybody talks about the HBS network, but it happens serendipitously and by happenstance. Can we be much more intentional about how the network is designed, built, and curated?

How could these changes affect the School’s interaction with the business community?

One hundred years ago, HBS figured out how to talk to companies, learn their secrets, and write cases to teach students and maybe even their competitors. If somebody had this great idea today, companies would say, “Are you kidding me?” But our forebears figured out how to make that happen, and now we can go to almost any company in the world and work with them.

The same opportunity exists around data sharing with companies. We can create data partnerships that enable us to help them answer really important issues they’re faced with, but which also enable us to do research that advances the knowledge frontier. But the only way we will be able to do that is with a proper digital infrastructure.

Our work with the OneTen Initiative is an early test of this. More than 40 companies have pledged to create jobs for one million Black Americans over the next decade, and we are their research partners for this project. The first question is how do we get the data on the existing situation and then track what OneTen is doing going forward so we can advise them on how to improve the hiring and promotion of Black Americans?

What role can alumni play to help the School achieve its goal?

In developing the task force report, we’ve drawn on the insights and experiences of alumni and will continue to connect with them as we shape our digital transformation. Our alumni are on the bleeding edge of this in a range of companies, from Stitch Fix to Spotify, from JP Morgan to Walt Disney. I also hope our alumni will hold HBS accountable on this.

In the century ahead, our capabilities in digital are going to be critical for all aspects of what the School does. If we’re successful in this digital transformation, we will be able to build on our strengths and be the premier business network in the world that understands how to generate value and solve important problems.

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